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Tuesday, February 28, 2012

ISGC: Inclusive, Progressive, Relevant

This morning, ISGC opened with a stunning visual presentation, covering the history of the conference and the institute that runs it (ASGC). A large number of familiar faces gave their congratulations for the 10th anniversary of this excellent conference, displaying a veritable United Nations of languages and cultures. From the beginnings in networking, to the massive ramp up of data fueled by the Large Hadron Collider project, the film documented the passion of Dr Simon Lin who led the push for grid computing in Taiwan, and indeed the Asia Pacific region.

Simon Lin and Steven Newhouse then welcomed all, with a few remarks and reflections on the hard work of those attending and organising the conference, before handing over to session chair Klaus-Peter Mickel.

The first speaker, a long-time contributer who should be familiar to all, Bob Jones graced us with a poignant reminder of the things which make this conference great. He analysed its growth, in tandem with the growth of the infrastructure and concluded that ISGC continues to stand by its original aims of being inclusive, progressive and relevant.

Steven Newhouse (EGI Director) followed, to discuss the current activities in Europe. Drawing on the history theme - a short evolution of the European grid organisations led to an overview of Federated Cloud Task Force, a project designed to reiterate the success of the grid, in the cloud paradigm. EGI's cloud strategy was clear - as cloud is used more and more, many other communities not necessarily involved in today's eResearch infrstructures will begin to be. I'm sure we can all agree with Steven: "...aim to give researchers what they want, when they want...". If, in our various projects, we can make research easier to perform, have faster turnarounds and reach greater heights then we have achieved our goals.